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Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
i do disagree with tore that a person is simply their genes and that any given gene's interest is that person's interest. this denies a human being their agency. to counter this point i will offer a simple example. say i have no children and i decide to sterilize myself because i feel having kids would impede on my career/happiness/whatever. am i acting in my own self interest in this case? by the logic that my interests should always necessarily correlate with that of my genes you would have to say no. and yet clearly i have other priorities which are important to me that i am seeking out and so i would say that it only really makes sense from an individual perspective to say yes.
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You are right. Our interests that look after our genes of course work at a very basic level. You know this already of course, but your want for sex is a powerful expression of a feeling which will motivate you into perpetuating your genes.
There could be more subtle motivations - you might regret your decision to sterilize yourself in the future, and that could be an influence of genes, directly for a programmed want for children or indirectly through some other social function f.ex, but it would be hard to trace the origin of every notion. Either way, the sum of our behaviours generally lead to children and that generally happens as a result of us doing what we want.
This is what I meant by how our viewpoint is from that of us as unique constellations. We see our needs as
selves, but we generally (though not always) act for the betterment of the bits we're made up of. It's an interesting duality of life.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Batlord
But the reason human society evolved in the first place is because it increases survival odds, which makes it more likely that you'll pass your genes on. Meaning that genes that encourage social cooperation should get passed on. It seems like the same basic evolutionary mechanism to me.
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This is all true, Batlord. Humans have evolved to become more social over time because cooperating with others is a great way to ensure
your own genes survival (not necessarily the species).
For a silly example about the species view of evolution, let's say we have a tiny population of two households, yours and your neighbour's. You are super nice and your neighbor is super selfish. You two are not related, so there's no kin selection. You are so nice that you give away resources to your neighbour and your neighbour is so selfish he doesn't reciprocate. Your efforts help to bring his selfish genes on and your own genes suffer from it. In the end, only his genes survive in the population.
He's the same species as you, but what value does that have? The answer is basically none. If he's not related to you and does not return the kindness, then by helping your fellow species member, you are actually turning yourself into an evolutionary dead-end. Hence, that behaviour wouldn't evolve, but would get weeded out by natural selection like in the example above.
When you get right down to it, it's a simple matter of cause and consequence. It is superbly formulated in the book The Selfish Gene mentioned by HWB and I think you'd probably love it
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